83

KRUPSKAYA AND LENIN TO LENIN’S SISTER MARIA

Written: Written March 17, 1899
Published:
First published in 1929 in the journal ProletarskayaRevolyutsiya No. 6.
Sent from Shushenskoye.
Printed from
the original.
Source:Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1977,
Moscow,
Volume 37,
pages 250-251.
Translated: The Late George H. Hanna
Transcription\Markup:D. MorosPublic Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive.
You may freely copy, distribute,
display and perform this work, as well as make derivative and
commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
Archive” as your source.
• README

My greetings will not arrive in time, dear Manya, they
will be late, but I nevertheless send you many, many kisses.
Thanks for the views of Brussels, although I do not want to
think of foreign countries too soon, I do not even want to
think about Russia. All I allow myself to think about is
the summer. In her last letter to us, M. Al. wrote that
she is coming to see us this summer with Anyuta, and today
in a letter to Podolsk I plunged into a description of the
charms of
Shusha.[1]
I even outlined a trip to Lake Perovo,
where we shall catch crucians and fry them. You see, the
Minusinsk crowd are asking to come to Shusha for the
summer, and we are thinking of acquiring a horse, so that it will
be easy to go everywhere. I have become quite a “patriot”
and can talk with great enthusiasm about the Yenisei, the
islands, the forest, etc. All the same I am sorry I am not
a man; I should wander around a lot more. Although I
should very much like to see you, I do not intend to tempt
you with Shusha, because, speaking impartially, Shusha is
a village like any other, and if I were asked today to choose
between a place to spend the summer—near Moscow or in
Shusha, I should choose the former.

Volodya is now greatly interested in Kautsky’s
Agrarfrage and is writing a review of
it.[2]
So far I can only glance
at the book and lick my chops. In general, we have quite
a lot of books and the very abundance of them only makes
one conscious of how much there is to be read and how little
one reads. We are not yet receiving Nachalo, so far only
that boring Russkoye Bogatstvo.

However, I must stop. Mother sends you kisses and
congratulations. Volodya intends to write himself.

We received M. Al.’s photo in the last post. It is an
excellent likeness, isn’t it?

I apologise, dear Manyasha, that this time, too, I am
writing very little, just adding my congratulations to
Nadya’s. The fact is that today a lot of letters have to be
written—to Turukhansk (the post goes once a
month),[3]
and then I have to send Anyuta a list of the misprints in
the clean proofs she sent me.

We have very little news. There is a lull in literary
activity—we keep waiting. Foreign newspapers write of events
in St. Petersburg and Finland (judging by Frankfurter
Zeitung) but what they write is inked over, so we know
very, very
little.[4]

Notes

[3]Lenin wrote to Y. O. Martov in Turukhansk but their
correspondence during exile in Siberia has been lost.

[4]The event referred to was a student strike that took place in thirty
higher educational establishments in St. Petersburg, Moscow,
Odessa, Kiev, Kharkov, Riga, Tomsk and other towns.

The disturbances in Finland were caused by the suspension of
the Finnish Constitution on February 3 (15), 1899. Evidently
the censor inked over the reports of these events published in
Frankfurter Zeitung.